The joint statement issued on February 6 following the four-day visit by the Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan to China has been an exceptional gesture by Beijing underscoring the highest importance attached to that country as a regional ally. Beijing feels the need to underscore that not only does it back the government in Islamabad to the hilt but is determined to boost the ties, especially by boosting the flagship of the Belt and Road Initiative known as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

Aside its overt emphasis on the launch of the CPEC’s Phase 2, the two highlights of the joint statement are: one, the affirmation that ’stronger’ defence and security cooperation will be ‘an important factor of peace and stability in the region,’ and, two, the joint initiative to take up with the Taliban government the holding of the China-Pakistan-Afghanistan Trilateral Foreign Ministers’ Dialogue as well as the ‘extension of CPEC to Afghanistan.’

New trends have appeared in regional security during the past 6-month period since the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan last August, which are highly consequential for regional politics. For a start, all evidence suggests that various terrorist groups continue to operate in Afghanistan. And groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir or the Islamic State affiliates have a long history of working as the West’s geopolitical tool.

The acute humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan following the abrupt ending of western assistance in August and the U.S. vengeful decision to freeze the country’s funds abroad are being turned around as pressure points by Washington to engage with the Taliban Government with a view to manipulate its attitudes and policies. With the departure of U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad, the CIA is in direct control of Washington’s dealings with the Taliban.

The Oslo talks (January 23-25) between the Taliban and the U.S. has been a turning point. Notably, last week, the U.S. Treasury Department has unilaterally ‘tweaked’ the sanctions regime against the Haqqani Network. Funds can now be transferred to Afghanistan by international banks, and aid agencies are allowed to work with the Haqqanis. Alongside, President Biden has designated Qatar as a ‘major non-NATO ally’ even as direct flights commenced last week between Kabul and Doha (where CIA operatives dealing with Afghan affairs are based), and, furthermore, Qatar will now be operating the Afghan airports and controlling that country’s air space. Taken together, Washington is rapidly putting in place the infrastructure for conducting its operations in Afghanistan pending diplomatic recognition and the establishment of physical presence.

Meanwhile, the climate of Pakistan’s relations with the Taliban government has deteriorated. A surge of cross-border violence culminated last week in brazen attacks on Pakistani military. The picture remains hazy. Intriguing questions arise as to the culpability.

The internal tensions within the Taliban are no big secret. It is only to be expected that at a time when the group is trying to gain international legitimacy and tackle domestic crisis, internal tensions get accentuated, as interest groups competing for positions and privileges pull in different directions. Suffice to say, the Taliban is more vulnerable today than ever to infiltration and manipulation by the western intelligence.

Recently, Barnett Rubin, former State Department official and expert on Afghanistan who was a key aide to late Richard Holbrooke, took a historical perspective when he said, “The Taliban are the most unified organisation in Afghanistan. There has never been a significant split in the organisation. There are many differences and rivalries that are seized on by their opponents as evidence that the Taliban are divided, but they have never been divided in practice. The CIA spent $1 bn trying to split the Taliban and failed.”

That was time past. Time present may hold surprises. What is apparent is that while the Taliban government is being seen by the world community as the monarch of all it surveys in Afghanistan, Washington is singling out the Haqqani Network as its interlocutor. The folklore used to be that the Haqqanis were the blue-eyed boys of Pakistan. Equally, they became synonymous with brutal acts of terrorism. That said, however, the Haqqanis also have another side to their bio-profile.

Lest it gets forgotten, the great patriarch Jalaluddin Haqqani’s rift with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the subsequent split with Hizb-i-Islami in 1979 was not due to the acceptance or rejection of radicalism but reflected regional geography and their respective tribal origins. The Haqqanis belong to the Zadran Pashtun tribe, a branch of the Kalani tribal confederacy inhabiting southeastern Afghanistan (Khost, Paktia and Paktika provinces) and parts of Pakistan’s Waziristan. That is what distinguishes the Haqqanis in the top rungs of the Taliban leadership in Kabul. Mullah Hasan Akhund, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Mullah Mohammed Yaqoob, etc. are largely drawn from the Abdali (Durrani) confederacy of the dominant Pashtun tribes.

True, the Taliban movement managed to put up a show of unity, but that was the period of the jihad against foreign occupation when clan and tribal identity got submerged and the friendship networks, or andiwali (Pashto for camaraderie) played an important cementing role. But even then, interestingly, the Haqqani Network had enjoyed battlefield autonomy while remaining politically subservient to the Quetta Shura.

Today, two factors become particularly important. First, no one knows whether the Taliban supremo Amir Hibatullah Akhundzada is still alive or not. There is a leadership vacuum. Second, since 2013-2014, Pakistan’s control of the Taliban had been progressively weakening following the assassination of several senior Taliban figures in Quetta. Now, these two factors combined together, there is no one with power or authority who can rein in the Taliban factions from going overboard. In all likelihood, Pakistan is helplessly watching. The cross-border tensions could well be a manifestation of this epochal transition in the Taliban’s tumultuous history.

Then, there is an interesting detail that has great relevance today. The Haqqanis and the CIA go back a long way. The Haqqani Network was the only Mujahideen group that then Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq permitted the CIA to have direct dealings during the 1980s jihad. How far that had anything to do with the Haqqanis’ devotion to ‘global jihad’ is a moot point today. The point is, it was in the safe hands of the Haqqanis that the CIA entrusted Osama bin Laden’s life and security during the 1980s jihad.

Is it coincidental that the U.S. has ‘tweaked’ the sanctions against the Haqqanis unilaterally so soon after the defeat in Afghanistan so as to revive their direct line of communication with them?

The regional states cannot but be worried. Simply put, the spectre that is haunting the region is the U.S.’ return to Afghanistan to finesse a new geopolitical tool for influencing regional politics in a wide arc of countries — Central Asian states, China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan. The China-Pakistan joint statement issued in Beijing on Sunday is a forceful signal from Beijing against any such attempt to use Afghan soil as a springboard to destabilise the region. But it is going to be an uphill struggle unless the attempt is nipped in the bud.

It is not without reason that the Chinese President Xi Jinping told his Kazakh counterpart Kassym-Jomart Tokayev at their meeting in Beijing on Saturday that ‘The dimension of China-Kazakhstan relations has gone beyond the bilateral scope and is of great significance to regional and even world peace and stability.’ The very next day, at the meeting with Imran Khan, President Xi emphasised that ‘as the world finds itself in a period of turbulence and transformation, China-Pakistan relations have gained greater strategic significance.’

On January 11, 2022, the United Nations (UN) Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths appealed to the international community to help raise $4.4 billion for Afghanistan in humanitarian aid, calling this effort, “the largest ever appeal for a single country for humanitarian assistance.” This amount is required “in the hope of shoring up collapsing basic services there,” said the UN. If this appeal is not met, Griffiths said, then “next year [2023] we’ll be asking for $10 billion.”

The figure of $10 billion is significant. A few days after the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in mid-August 2021, the U.S. government announced the seizure of $9.5 billion in Afghan assets that were being held in the U.S. banking system. Under pressure from the United States government, the International Monetary Fund also denied Afghanistan access to $455 million of its share of special drawing rights, the international reserve asset that the IMF provides to its member countries to supplement their original reserves. These two figures—which constitute Afghanistan’s monetary reserves—amount to around $10 billion, the exact number Griffiths said that the country would need if the United Nations does not immediately get an emergency disbursement for providing humanitarian relief to Afghanistan.

A recent analysis by development economist Dr. William Byrd for the United States Institute of Peace, titled, “How to Mitigate Afghanistan’s Economic and Humanitarian Crises,” noted that the economic and humanitarian crises being faced by the country are a direct result of the cutoff of $8 billion in annual aid to Afghanistan and the freezing of $9.5 billion of the country’s “foreign exchange reserves” by the United States. The analysis further noted that the sanctions relief—given by the U.S. Treasury Department and the United Nations Security Council on December 22, 2021—to provide humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan should also be extended to “private business and commercial transactions.” Byrd also mentioned the need to find ways to pay salaries of health workers, teachers and other essential service providers to prevent an economic collapse in Afghanistan and suggested using “a combination of Afghan revenues and aid funding” for this purpose.

Meanwhile, the idea of paying salaries directly to the teachers came up in an early December 2021 meeting between the UN’s special envoy for Afghanistan Deborah Lyons and Afghanistan’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai. None of these proposals, however, seem to have been taken seriously in Washington, D.C.

A Humanitarian Crisis

In July 2020, before the pandemic hit the country hard, and long before the Taliban returned to power in Kabul, the Ministry of Economy in Afghanistan had said that 90 percent of the people in the country lived below the international poverty line of $2 a day. Meanwhile, since the beginning of its war in Afghanistan in 2001, the United States government has spent $2.313 trillion on its war efforts, according to figures provided by Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University; but despite spending 20 years in the country’s war, the United States government spent only $145 billion on the reconstruction of the country’s institutions, according to its own estimates. In August, before the Taliban defeated the U.S. military forces, the United States government’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) published an important report that assessed the money spent by the U.S. on the country’s development. The authors of the report wrote that despite some modest gains, “progress has been elusive and the prospects for sustaining this progress are dubious.” The report pointed to the lack of development of a coherent strategy by the U.S. government, excessive reliance on foreign aid, and pervasive corruption inside the U.S. contracting process as some of the reasons that eventually led to a “troubled reconstruction effort” in Afghanistan. This resulted in an enormous waste of resources for the Afghans, who desperately needed these resources to rebuild their country, which had been destroyed by years of war.

On December 1, 2021, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) released a vital report on the devastating situation in Afghanistan. In the last decade of the U.S. occupation, the annual per capita income in Afghanistan fell from $650 in 2012 to around $500 in 2020 and is expected to drop to $350 in 2022 if the population increases at the same pace as it has in the recent past. The country’s gross domestic product will contract by 20 percent in 2022, followed by a 30 percent drop in the following years. The following sentences from the UNDP report are worth quoting in full to understand the extent of humanitarian crisis being faced by the people in the country: “According to recent estimates, only 5 percent of the population has enough to eat, while the number of those facing acute hunger is now estimated to have… reached a record 23 million. Almost 14 million children are likely to face crisis or emergency levels of food insecurity this winter, with 3.5 million children under the age of five expected to suffer from acute malnutrition, and 1 million children risk dying from hunger and low temperatures.”

Lifelines

This unraveling humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is the reason for the January 11 appeal to the international community by the UN. On December 18, 2021, the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) held an emergency meeting—called for by Saudi Arabia—on Afghanistan in Islamabad, Pakistan. Outside the meeting room—which merely produced a statement—the various foreign ministers met with Afghanistan’s interim Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi. While in Islamabad, Muttaqi met with the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Thomas West. A senior official with the U.S. delegation told Kamran Yousaf of the Express Tribune (Pakistan), “We have worked quietly to enable cash… [to come into] the country in larger and larger denominations.” A foreign minister at the OIC meeting told me that the OIC states are already working quietly to send humanitarian aid to Afghanistan.

Four days later, on December 22, the United States introduced a resolution (2615) in the UN Security Council that urged a “humanitarian exception” to the harsh sanctions against Afghanistan. During the meeting, which took place for approximately 40 minutes, nobody raised the matter that the U.S., which proposed the resolution, had decided to freeze the $10 billion that belonged to Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the passage of this resolution was widely celebrated since everyone understands the gravity of Afghanistan’s crisis. Meanwhile, Zhang Jun, China’s permanent representative to the UN, raised problems relating to the far-reaching effects of such sanctions and urged the council to “guide the Taliban to consolidate interim structures, enabling them to maintain security and stability, and to promote reconstruction and recovery.”

A senior member of the Afghan central bank (Da Afghanistan Bank) told me that much-needed resources are expected to enter the country as part of humanitarian aid being provided by Afghanistan’s neighbors, particularly from China, Iran and Pakistan (aid from India will come through Iran). Aid has also come in from other neighboring countries, such as Uzbekistan, which sent 3,700 tons of food, fuel and winter clothes, and Turkmenistan, which sent fuel and food. In early January 2022, Muttaqi traveled to Tehran, Iran, to meet with Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and Iran’s Special Representative for Afghanistan Hassan Kazemi Qomi. While Iran has not recognized the Taliban government as the official government of Afghanistan, it has been in close contact with the government “to help the deprived people of Afghanistan to reduce their suffering.” Muttaqi has, meanwhile, emphasized that his government wants to engage the major powers over the future of Afghanistan.

On January 10, the day before the UN made its most recent appeal for coming to the aid of Afghanistan, a group of charity groups and NGOs—organized by the Zakat Foundation of America—held an Afghan Peace and Humanitarian Task Force meeting in Washington. The greatest concern is the humanitarian crisis being faced by the people of Afghanistan, notably the imminent question of starvation in the country, with the roads already closed off due to the harsh winter witnessed in the region.

In November 2021, Afghanistan’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai urged the United States to reopen its embassy in Kabul; a few weeks later, he said that the U.S. is responsible for the crisis in Afghanistan, and it “should play an active role” in repairing the damage it has done to the country. This sums up the present mood in Afghanistan: open to relations with the U.S., but only after it allows the Afghan people access to the nation’s own money in order to save Afghan lives.

Globetrotter via counterpunch.org

Virtually nothing about the Afghanistan War was inadvertent.

By Andrew BACEVICH

The American War in Afghanistan: A History, by Carter Malkasian (Oxford University Press, 2021), 561 pages.

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War, by Craig Whitlock (Simon & Schuster, 2021), 346 pages.

August 26, 2021, was not a good day for America. On that date in Kabul, a suicide bomber killed thirteen U.S. troops supporting hastily arranged evacuation operations from Hamid Karzai International Airport. An estimated 170 Afghans also died.

August 26 was also not a good day for foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan. On that date, Kagan published a column in the Washington Post in which he offered an upbeat assessment of the ongoing Global War on Terrorism. Disregarding the torrent of bad news pouring in from Afghanistan, Kagan wrote that despite “inevitably mixed and uncertain results,” the overall enterprise “has been successful—astoundingly so.”

Kagan was perplexed that others might entertain a different view. “Why does every American setback have to be a morality tale,” he wondered, “a search for scapegoats and an indictment of American foreign policy in general?” Why, he asked, had disappointments in Afghanistan “been treated by so many as a tale of sin and hubris?” That the war on terror had “come to be viewed as a symptom and for some the source of much of America’s troubles today” was altogether mystifying.

That same day, retired Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, a distinguished army officer who served a brief, unhappy term as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, appeared on MSNBC to offer his own assessment of the Afghanistan War. Unlike Kagan, McMaster was not going to pretend that the war’s outcome was anything other than a humiliating defeat.

Moreover, McMaster knew precisely who was to blame. Responsibility for the dismal outcome did not rest with either the political leaders or military commanders who presided over America’s longest war. Instead, McMaster fingered “the neo-isolationist far right” and “the self-loathing far left.” The United States had suffered defeat because the American people had failed, given up, quit. Perseverance would have yielded a different outcome.

Interviewed by the New Yorker, retired General David Petraeus concurred. “Somebody asked me if we lost the Afghan war. I said I don’t think we lost it. I think we withdrew from it.”Sure, mistakes were made, Petraeus acknowledged. But the outcome turned on the question of time. “You don’t take a seventh-century, ultra-fundamentalist, theocratic Islamist regime…and turn it into a modern military power” overnight. Undercutting U.S. efforts in Afghanistan “was all this impatience that it was our longest war and all the rest of that.” Twenty years weren’t enough.

The temptation to weigh in proved too much for former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz to resist. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he seconded the call for persistence. Wolfowitz looked forward to the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 as “an occasion for defiance, and for pride in the Americans who fought, sacrificed and successfully protected our country for two decades from further mass-casualty attacks,” something that twenty years ago had “seemed impossible.” Viewed from this perspective, the Afghanistan War had contributed to a larger strategic success.

Even so, there is more armed conflict to come. The war on terrorism will continue, Wolfowitz believes, and it “is going to be very long.” As an incident in that long war, Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan compared with Neville Chamberlain’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938. To drive home the point, Wolfowitz quoted Winston Churchill, implicitly suggesting that with a dose of Churchillian leadership from the White House, all would be well.

What Kagan, McMaster, Petraeus, and Wolfowitz share in common is an aversion to data. The costs incurred by the United States in its Global War on Terrorism—upwards of $8 trillion expended, thousands of U.S. troops dead, tens of thousands more wounded—go simply unmentioned, as does the fact that those costs will continue to accumulate.According to one authoritative estimate, by 2050, the expense of caring for post-9/11 U.S. veterans will reach between $2.2 and $2.5 trillion.

Any tally of the burdens borne by Americans pales in comparison with the far greater toll of death and destruction visited upon civilian populations in places where superior U.S. firepower has pulverized adversaries along with anyone with the misfortune to get caught in the crossfire. Just days after the August 26 incident at the Kabul airport, a U.S. drone strike intended to preempt another such attack killed ten Afghan bystanders, including seven children. This was hardly the first time that an American missile went astray.

Also absent from the analyses offered by Kagan, McMaster, Petraeus, and Wolfowitz were any references to the factors cited to justify a “global war” in the first place. Washington’s once-upon-a-time nemesis Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction, all the promises to spread freedom and democracy to the far corners of the planet—none received mention.

Most significantly, none of the four offered an adequate explanation for why actual victory—the enemy vanquished, tickertape parades to follow—has proven so elusive. Back in 2001, at the outset of Operation Enduring Freedom, the war’s purpose included providing Afghans with enduring freedom, not delivering them back into the clutches of the Taliban.

How is it that the world’s strongest and most generously endowed armed force, taking on an adversary possessing neither an air force nor heavy weapons, failed to accomplish its assigned mission despite vast exertions and considerable sacrifice? In contrasting books, Carter Malkasian, a civilian Pentagon adviser with firsthand experience in Afghanistan, and Craig Whitlock, a seasoned journalist with the Washington Post, present preliminary answers to that question.

Malkasian offers a conventional take on a decidedly unconventional conflict. His narrative centers on a series of nominally distinctive campaigns, which he describes in granular detail. In that regard, The American War in Afghanistan conforms to the predilections of professional soldiers and many orthodox military analysts. In place of, say, Ypres, the Somme, and Vimy Ridge, his chronology focuses on the Surge in Helmand, the Surge in Kandahar, the Andar Awakening, and the Taliban Offensives of 2015 and 2016.

This approach imparts to war a comforting semblance of order and rationality. It implicitly assumes that directives passed down from civilian policymakers to senior commanders in the field correlate with actual outcomes. This perspective emphasizes bureaucratic process at the expense of other factors such as history and culture.

In Afghanistan, history and culture were determinative. The outcome of the war turned on Afghan memory and American illusions, the first infused with religion, the second tied to ideology.

For the Taliban, the memories that motivated fighters related to foreigners with the temerity to interfere with the Afghan way of life. That way of life centers on Islam, tribalism, and a deep hostility to interfering outsiders. Anyone deemed to disrespect Islam or the traditions to which Afghans are devoted becomes a sworn enemy. That came to include the United States and its coalition partners when they toppled the Taliban regime in the autumn of 2001 and then embarked upon a hastily improvised, massively ambitious, and inadequately resourced nation-building campaign.

For the United States, the ideology that shaped policy in Afghanistan centered on Western-style freedom, American-style democracy, and a conviction that U.S. military supremacy offered the means to win over recalcitrants or bring them heel. This turned out to be a fantasy.

In 2002, George W. Bush briefly flirted with the idea of a “Marshall Plan” for Afghanistan, but the proposal never made the transition from presidential speech to actual program. In practice, as soon as the Taliban had been ousted from Kabul, Afghanistan became an afterthought, eclipsed by administration eagerness to target Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld in particular wanted nothing further to do with Afghanistan. In his view, the less attention devoted to the place the better. “There is no greater villain in America’s Afghan War than Donald Rumsfeld,” Malkasian believes.

Convinced that the Taliban had been decisively defeated, American political and military leaders deemed it unnecessary to negotiate with them on the terms of a political settlement. At “its moment of peak bargaining power,” Malkasian writes, the U.S.-led coalition “purposely scuttled a chance for peace” and thereby “set Afghanistan back down the road to war.”

Heavy-handed actions by the relatively small U.S.-led force that remained in Afghanistan made matters worse. Coalition efforts to clean up any “terrorist” residue did not distinguish between former Taliban fighters and active members of al Qaeda. As a consequence, “scores of Taliban who had tried to live peacefully until U.S. forces raided their homes, imprisoned them, or hurt a family member” once more picked up the gun. In effect, indiscriminate violence provoked renewed resistance. By 2005, a reconstituted Taliban had initiated a deliberate campaign to oust the infidels.

A parade of American generals (with British counterparts) rotated through Afghanistan, many serving multiple tours. They arrived bearing pithy maxims that briefed well but did not easily translate into a practical template for operations. Up at higher headquarters, for example, “clear, hold, build, and engage” might sound pretty good. Down where subalterns explain the day’s operations to a handful of noncoms, not so much.

British participation did not rate as a plus. For Americans, the presence of Tommies on the battlefield alongside U.S. troops conjures up memories of earlier Anglo-American partnerships, conferring an extra dollop of legitimacy on the entire enterprise. Afghans entertain a different view, remembering and resenting Great Britain’s 19th century penchant for imperial meddling. “The degree to which that hatred persisted escaped just about every U.S. and British decisionmaker,” Malkasian observes. “Resistance to the British would be a powerful rallying cry.”

Malkasian argues that President Barack Obama’s December 2009 decision to increase the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan “brought the United States back into the war” with credit going to successive American four-star commanders Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus.

The claim is unpersuasive. By his own estimation, McChrystal’s effort to implement a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign failed. When McChrystal stepped down in disgrace, Petraeus replaced him in Kabul. A “great captain” in Malkasian’s estimation, Petraeus effectively abandoned COIN in favor of intensified bombing. That large numbers of Taliban were thereby killed is doubtless the case, but Afghan hearts and minds were not won.

By way of example, Malkasian describes the liberation of several villages in Kandahar Province in 2010. Rather than risk heavy casualties, the American commander in charge of the operation, “resorted to carpet bombing,” which Petraeus “personally approved.” Heavy airstrikes—twenty-five 2000-pound bombs and fifty 500-pound bombs—flattened the villages. “We obliterated those towns. They’re not there at all,” a pleased U.S. commander attested. All that remained were “just parking lots.”

Once the dust settled, the priority shifted to rebuilding, with U.S. authorities quickly “constructing a new bazaar and new concrete homes. Supposedly, the people were not upset,” Malkasian writes. Even so, “few ever returned” and the “strange concrete homes built with American dollars sat empty.” All in all, it was a fresh take on the infamous Vietnam-era incident that found U.S. troops “destroying a village in order to save it.”

In May 2011, when Navy Seals swooped into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden, Americans celebrated. The success had no impact on the ongoing war. In truth, by this time, the final outcome, although still a decade in the future, was all but foreordained. Obama wanted out. His successor Donald Trump was even more insistent on ending the endless war. By agreeing to “peace talks” with the Taliban in February 2020, while excluding authorities in Kabul from any ensuing negotiations, the United States effectively signed the Afghan government’s death warrant. All that remained was to settle on the terms of the “decent interval” that would enable the United States to leave without having to admit outright defeat.

Interspersed throughout Malkasian’s narrative are allusions to the myriad factors that doomed coalition efforts in Afghanistan. Few of the items on this long litany are unfamiliar. They include Pakistani double-dealing; vast corruption pervading every corner of Afghan life; the drug trade; tribal disunity; hypocritical coalition collaboration with brutal warlords; the ineptitude of development efforts, exacerbated by the U.S. government’s reliance on rapacious private contractors; the difficulty of motivating of Afghan security forces to fight, given the Taliban’s advantage in standing for “what it meant to be Afghan.” Not least was the problem of Hamid Karzai, chosen by the United States to be the George Washington of modern Afghanistan. Karzai “did not define the Taliban as his enemy,” Malkasian writes. “His enemies were outsiders who harmed the Afghan people.” U.S. forces conducting raids and airstrikes that killed Afghans figured prominently among the outsiders raising Karzai’s ire.

Yet if the items comprising that litany are familiar, why did Afghanistan’s abrupt collapse in August 2021 come as such a shock? In The Afghanistan Papers, Craig Whitlock offers a persuasive answer: because U.S. political leaders and coalition commanders routinely lied about the war’s actual trajectory. It’s not that American and British leaders erred in thinking that things were headed in a positive direction. They fully recognized that the war was going badly but engaged in “an unspoken conspiracy to mask the truth.”

The evidence that Whitlock offers to document that claim is abundant, authoritative, and utterly damning. It is also drawn from unimpeachable sources, primarily U.S. government records such as interviews conducted with U.S. troops after their return from the war zone. Speaking to Congress or the press, their superiors spun, dissembled, deceived, told bald-face lies. Speaking for posterity, the troops told the truth: The war was a massive cock-up.

By way of an example, consider General Mark Milley, who currently chairs the Joint Chiefs of Staff and is therefore the senior U.S. military officer on active duty. As a three-star general serving in Afghanistan in 2013, Milley assured reporters that “the conditions are set for winning this war,” with Afghan security forces “very, very effective in combat against the insurgents every single day.” Coalition and Afghan forces were “on the road to victory, on the road to winning, on the road to creating a stable Afghanistan.” As Whitlock makes clear, Milley was by no means the only senior officer peddling this fraudulent line.

The Afghanistan Papers raises troubling questions about the competence of the American officer corps. No amount of buck-passing will absolve the U.S. military of substantial responsibility for the dismal outcome of the Afghanistan War. Hardly less troubling are questions about the standards of integrity that prevail in the upper ranks of the American military profession.

Defeat does sometimes prompt introspection, which is a precondition for reform. Whether the senior officers of General Milley’s generation have the capacity and willingness to engage in honest introspection appears doubtful, especially if Congress keeps doling out the money as it appears inclined to do. So let the purges begin.

Writing in the New York Times, Ross Douthat described the outcome of the Afghanistan War as “a failure so broad that it should demand purges in the Pentagon, the shamed retirement of innumerable hawkish talking heads, the razing of various NGOs and international-studies programs and the dissolution of countless consultancies and military contractors.” Douthat’s list of targets strike me as about right.

“The moral question for Afghanistan boils down to whether intervention is just,” Carter Malkasian writes in concluding his history. In this particular intervention, “We resuscitated a state of civil war so that we could sleep a little sounder at home. Villages were destroyed. Families disappeared. It was inadvertent.”

That last assertion cannot be allowed to stand.

Virtually nothing about the Afghanistan War was inadvertent. The war’s conduct offered a vivid example of conspicuous military malpractice, stemming from a poisonous blend of hubris, incompetence, and moral indifference. In combination with its infernal twin in Iraq, the Afghanistan War represented a last desperate effort to sustain the global primacy to which Washington had laid claim following the Cold War.

The outcome of America’s post-9/11 military misadventures, coupled with the sundry afflictions that the United States has recently sustained on the home front, has definitively discredited any such claim to primacy. With the end of the Afghanistan War, Americans ought to have had their fill of distant crusades. A long list of issues far closer to home and possessing greater immediacy are demanding attention.

The United States is planning to redouble its weapons supply to Ukraine. What is shaping up is an intensified proxy war against Russia in which the Russophobic Kiev regime acts as Washington’s catspaw. The objective is to debilitate Russia in the same way the U.S. sapped the Soviet Union with a quagmire war in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

U.S. media reports cite Pentagon and Ukrainian officials saying that the Biden administration is considering a massive increase in armaments to the Kiev regime. This is on top of the $2.5 billion in military support that Washington has already given over the past eight years. The Biden administration has overseen $450 million in weaponry to Ukraine this year alone with a further $300 million budgeted for the coming 12 months. A separate proposal going through the Senate is seeking to boost military support for next year by another $450 million.

What gives added significance to this weapons pipeline is where they are being sourced. U.S. media reports say the arms are from inventories the Pentagon had allocated for the American-backed army in Afghanistan before it collapsed with the sudden Taliban victory in August. The weapons include Black Hawk helicopters and anti-armor munitions.

Other weapons under consideration for supply to Ukraine include more Javelin anti-tank missiles as well as Stinger anti-aircraft munitions.

In addition to the inventories previously allocated for Afghanistan, the U.S. is also planning weapons supplies from covert stockpiles overseen by the CIA in Romania and Bulgaria. This is the dark supply route that the U.S. and NATO allies used for arming terrorist proxies in a failed bid to overthrow the Syrian government. Russia’s military intervention in Syria in late 2015 defeated Washington’s regime-change objective in Damascus.

The year before, in 2014, the U.S. and its allies succeeded in their regime-change operation in Ukraine when an elected government friendly with Moscow was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup d’état. That coup brought to power a Neo-Nazi Russophobic regime that has been waging a civil war against the ethnic Russian population of southeast Ukraine. U.S. and NATO weapons supplies have motivated the Kiev regime to persist in hostilities despite a formal peace agreement known as the Minsk accord signed in 2015. France and Germany, supposed guarantors of the accord along with Russia, have both turned a blind eye to Kiev’s systematic violations.

Since the Biden administration took office 11 months ago, the Kiev regime has stepped up its provocations in southeast Ukraine. These provocations are ultimately aimed at destabilizing Russia. As well as weaponry, American and other NATO special forces are on the ground in Ukraine acting as “military advisors”. The accelerator for aggression has been stepped on in recent weeks.

The Kremlin has warned that the Ukrainian forces are ratcheting up hostilities towards the southeastern region that borders Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently said that the siege on the region also known as Donbass resembles a genocide.

The stark fact is that there is already a proxy war going on in Ukraine against Russia. Arguably, that has been the U.S. objective since the coup in Kiev in February 2014. The current escalation of violence by the Kiev regime with U.S. and NATO support means that there is a directive from Washington for widening the war.

Paradoxically, or perhaps more accurately, cynically, the U.S. and its NATO allies are boldly inverting reality with a torrent of claims that they are “defending” Ukraine from “Russian aggression”. Recent weeks have seen a full-court media propaganda campaign to shift the blame on an alleged Russian force build-up. Moscow has vehemently denied it has plans to invade Ukraine. It points out that satellite imagery cited by the U.S. and its allies for claiming a Russian build-up actually shows forces in established bases hundreds of kilometers from the border with Ukraine.

Taking stock of the situation: Ukrainian forces are stepping up aggression against the Russian-speaking population under siege for nearly eight years in the Donbass region. The U.S., NATO and European Union are complicit in this criminal aggression by weaponizing, training and apologizing for the Kiev regime with spurious allegations against Russia. Furthermore, there is an unprecedented build-up of U.S. and NATO forces in the Black Sea region conducting unscheduled war drills on Russia’s border. That is inescapably acting to embolden the unhinged Kiev regime, even more, to take the war to Russia.

Moscow is earnestly warning Washington and its NATO partners of red lines. Russia has called for a formal agreement to prohibit NATO expansion for Ukraine’s membership of the military bloc as well as installation of American weapons systems on Ukrainian territory.

Washington and its NATO partners appear complacent to a degree that suggests criminal complicity in fanning the tensions.

The Biden White House has already signaled that it will not reciprocate with Russia’s request for these security guarantees. Even if Washington somehow manages to muster the political will to appear to give Moscow some security reassurances, the fact remains that the U.S. and its NATO allies are already deeply involved in waging a proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.

Plans for redoubling weapons flow to Ukraine from inventories allocated for Afghanistan and from covert CIA-run networks in Eastern Europe indicate the proxy war is set for a deliberate escalation.

Senior U.S. lawmakers have intimated that the preferred scenario for Washington is to create a quagmire for Russia similar to the trap set for the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s. That proxy war in which the U.S. armed Mujahideen militants with Stinger missiles greatly sapped the Soviet Union leading to its demise. Those militants later evolved into Al Qaeda networks that were used in the failed U.S.-backed regime-change operation in Syria over the past decade.

The Russophobic Kiev regime is being driven to escalate its terror war against the Russian people in Donbas. The objective is to draw Russia into that war to defend people with whom it is culturally connected. The moral imperative on Moscow to act would be huge. Washington is calculating that the move turns into a quagmire that will debilitate Russia and tarnish its international standing.

But this nefarious plan – an Afghanistan-Syria redux – could so easily slide over the abyss into a full war between the United States and Russia. Moscow seems to be more cognizant of that possible disaster than Washington which is afflicted with the insouciance of arrogance.

They shall not return to us, the strong men coldly slain
In sight of help denied from day to day:
But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain,
Are they too strong and wise to put away?

Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour?
When the storm is ended shall we find
How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power
By the favour and contrivance of their kind?

Their lives cannot repay us – their death could not undo –
The shame that they have laid upon our race.
But the slothfulness that wasted and the arrogance that slew,
Shall we leave it unabated in its place?

– from ‘Mesopotamia’, by Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling’s savage denunciation of the British politicians and officials responsible for the disastrous First World War campaign in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) exactly describes the uncaring incompetence of those supposedly in charge of the shambolic British evacuation from Kabul in Afghanistan in August.

Among those abandoned “in sight of help” was a man whose nine-year-old child was no longer breathing after being crushed in the crowd of 25,000 desperate people trying to escape the Taliban. A senior military officer friendly to the British returned to Kabul expecting to be murdered because he would otherwise have had to leave behind several of his children who did not have the right documents. Even if they had received them, they might have failed to get inside the airport through the milling crowds because no buses had been arranged by the Foreign Office.

As for the “slothfulness that wasted and the arrogance that slew”, what better exemplar could there be of these two lethal qualities than the then foreign secretary Dominic Raab? He extended his holiday in Crete at the height of the crisis, and was culpably out of his depth when he finally returned. Raphael Marshall, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office whistle-blower, told the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee how Raab had said “he would need all the cases [for evacuation] set out in a well-presented table to make decisions”.

About this crazed disengagement from reality, Marshall says mildly that the foreign secretary “did not understand the desperate situation at Kabul airport”, though a glance at a television would have shown him the chaos and panic.

But Raab was not alone in his inactivity. The head of the diplomatic service, Sir Philip Barton, began a three-week holiday on 9 August and, despite the fall of Kabul to the Taliban on 15 August, did not return to the Foreign Office until 28 August. He told the committee he had since “reflected carefully on this” and accepted retrospectively that his decision to stick to his bucket and spade during the crisis, the culmination of a 20-year war in which 457 members of the British forces had died, was a mistake.

The excuse for their absences offered by both men during the last agonies of Afghanistan is that their presence in Whitehall would have made no difference. This self-serving admission of ineffectuality would be comical, even if it was true – but it is contradicted by Marshall in his detailed statement about the failings of the Foreign Office in August. Ignorance of Afghanistan was total in his team, the leader of which at one moment “did not know that the correct term for people from Afghanistan was Afghans and referred repeatedly to ‘Afghanis’”.

But Marshall’s evidence also makes clear that little expertise was needed to at least look at the emails of tens of thousands of Afghans trying to escape the Taliban, which remained unread. The main failure was lack of manpower, which could have been swiftly mobilised from within the civil service as a whole. This did not happen because of the lack of direction from politicians like Boris Johnson and Raab and senior civil servants such as Barton and other Foreign Office mandarins.

This failure of leadership which produced the fiasco of the evacuation – and Marshall makes clear what an unnecessary mess it was – has broader implications. Is it one more symptom of the hollowing out and decay of the British state? Is not the situation now worse than in Kipling’s day? He snarled at the way that the guilty authors of a calamitous campaign had “sidled back to power” due to their political friends and connections.

Contrast this with their modern counterparts who, however much they blundered in Afghanistan, are not sidling anywhere fast because they do not have to. They still hold important jobs and express little contrition about the Afghans left behind. Kipling said that it was not enough “to be angry for an hour”, but this time round public outrage did not even last that long. The botched evacuation scarcely makes the list of scandals engulfing, and possibly capsizing, the Johnson government.

But stupidity, ignorance and incompetence seldom explain everything in any failure. Joe Biden, Johnson and their senior lieutenants say that they and their intelligence services were wrong-footed by the unexpected speed of the Taliban advance and the Kabul government collapse.

But this does not quite explain why so many decision makers went away on holiday and stayed there. Barton departed just two days before the Foreign Office concluded that Kabul was about to fall to the Taliban and blithely continued his vacation when the Afghan capital fell. I suspect that what really explains the lackadaisical attitude of American and British main players was that they did not expect the last days of the Afghan war to make such a splash. After all Afghanistan had never attracted as much media attention as the Iraq war. Nobody had paid much attention to Donald Trump’s agreement in 2020 to abandon the Kabul government and do a deal with the Taliban which Biden unwisely decided to fulfil to the letter in 2021.

What caught so many experienced political players with their pants down was that they did not foresee that the last gripping but appalling scenes of the Afghan war would be played out night after night in front of the television and phone cameras outside Kabul airport. They were transfixed and did not know what to say or do as people in the rest of the world, for almost the first time, could see the grisly tragedy unfolding before their eyes and – in the US at least – were looking for somebody to blame.

Lost in the melodrama of the last days at Kabul airport were any longer-term lessons that might have been learnt. In recent years, the US and UK have been trying to wage war on the cheap, at least in terms of their own armies. They withdrew almost all their ground troops and relied on the Afghan army, supported by their air power, to hold the cities, big towns and main roads. But this strategy ceded much of the Afghan countryside, where 70 per cent of Afghans live, to the enemy. Once American air power was withdrawn, Taliban fighters closed in for the kill.

counterpunch.org

Where America goes in the Middle East, extremist groups tend to follow.

By Bradley DEVLIN

With the United States out of Afghanistan, former members of the Afghan Security Forces who were once trained by the United States are joining Islamic State-Khorasan Province, better known as ISIS-K, the Islamic State’s regional affiliate. The result is all too predictable given America’s track record of inadvertently aiding the creation of extremist groups in the Middle East.

As it stands now, the number of former members of the Afghan Security Forces joining up with ISIS-K remains small, but it is growing, according to both Taliban fighters and other former members of the Afghan Security Forces.

One former Afghan official told the Wall Street Journal that an officer who commanded the Afghan National Army’s weapons and ammunition depot in Gardez joined ISIS-K after the Afghan army became defunct, and was killed last month in a firefight with the Taliban. The official also said he knows several other members of the Afghan Security Forces who joined ISIS-K after the Taliban searched their homes and ordered them to present themselves to Taliban authorities once the Taliban took control of the country.

The Wall Street Journal also spoke to a resident of Qarabagh in the Ghazni province who said his cousin, previously a member of the Afghan army’s special forces, disappeared in September shortly after the U.S. withdrawal and has joined an ISIS-K cell. The Qarabagh man also said he knows four other former Afghan National Army soldiers who enlisted in ISIS-K in the past few weeks.

ISIS-K became known throughout the world when a suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. service members and approximately 200 Afghans in an attack near the Kabul airport as the United States was completing its withdrawal in August.

Created in 2014 by former Taliban militants who were dissatisfied with potential peace talks and sought to take more drastic measures to fight the United States, ISIS-K has thus far played relatively a minor role in the network of extremist organizations operating in Afghanistan. Their relegation was a result of choosing both the Taliban and the United States as their enemies, as the nascent extremist outfit was ill-equipped to defend its territorial holdings in eastern Afghanistan, which the Taliban took from them in 2015.

Even though its footprint is limited, ISIS-K has made a name for itself for its incredible brutality. Beyond the suicide bombing in August, ISIS-K claimed responsibility for bombings at Shiite mosques in Kunduz and Kandahar that killed more than 100. Beyond military, political, and religious targets, ISIS-K has perpetrated attacks at schools and hospitals. In one attack, the group allegedly went through a maternity ward and shot nurses and pregnant women to death.

However, the challenge ISIS-K poses to the Taliban, much less the United States, should not be overstated. For the time being, ISIS-K does not have the fighting force or capability to mount a real challenge to the Taliban’s control of Afghanistan. The Taliban seems to recognize this and, although they likely still view the group as a security concern, has rebuffed claims that suggested ISIS-K could be a threat to their regained power. While the United States should continue to monitor the actions of ISIS-K in Afghanistan and Pakistan for potential security concerns, the threat it poses to the American homeland should not be exaggerated just because it bears the Islamic State’s name.

For two decades, America’s foreign policy elites pushed the narrative that members of the Afghan Security Forces were liberal idealists that would put their training from the U.S. military to good use in fighting extremism of all stripes. Those who questioned the prevailing narrative about the United States’ presence in Afghanistan were charged with betraying the troops and abandoning the Afghans. But no amount of emotionally-charged propaganda from the foreign policy establishment could cover up what Afghan war skeptics knew all along: reality, not ideals, govern the sands of Afghanistan.

Now that the U.S. is mostly out of the picture, “In some areas, ISIS has become very attractive” to former members of the Afghan Security Forces, Rahmatullah Nabil, the former acting director of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, told the Wall Street Journal.

The fact that former members of the Afghan government “are willing to join groups like ISIS-K shows you how weak their commitments were to the ostensible values that the government was meant to be promoting,” Will Ruger, vice president of foreign policy at the Charles Koch Institute and a TAC board member, told The American Conservative. “Either they didn’t believe these things that deeply in the first place, or, even if they came to accept some of those things, they’re willing to throw them overboard for the right vehicle for power and influence and other pragmatic ends.”

The reality is, above all else, the Afghan Security Forces were held together by rubber bands of cash. Young Afghan men did not enlist in the Afghan Security Forces because their hearts yearned for liberal democracy. Maybe some of them did in part, but the prospect of a steady job and income was the main draw to join the Afghan Security Forces.

Which is why Adam Korzeniewski, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who was deployed to Afghanistan twice and was an appointee in the Treasury Department and Commerce Department under the Trump administration, told TAC via email that “the rhetoric of these Afghan Security Forces being noble warfighters is actually dangerous, and a legacy of the endless propaganda machine of the warmongering Neoliberal right of the Bush years.”

“While there were motivated Afghan security forces, the average person was there for income stability and sustenance,” Korzeniewski went on to say. “Remember that Afghanistan is a very poor country with difficulties feeding its population. Complicating this with widespread drug use, the Afghan military wasn’t at the point where it was going to be capable of independently closing with and destroying Taliban. Many Afghan soldiers and police officers in my experience were constantly high.”

Beyond substance abuse and addiction among the Afghan army’s rank-and-file, crooked schemes, such as enlistment fraud orchestrated by Afghan officers and soldiers that sought to collect the U.S.-backed paychecks of ghost soldiers, threw gasoline on greed and corruption that was already spreading like wildfire. This chicanery created a prisoner’s dilemma in which the profit motives for members of the Afghan Security Forces propelled them to take actions that ensured hardly anyone was getting paid—much less in a timely manner.

When money dried up, so too did the allegiance of the Afghan soldiers.

“Next month, if the government doesn’t pay me, maybe I should just sell this to the Taliban,” Noor Ahmad Zhargi, a member of the Afghan police force, told the Washington Post in an interview from this past spring. While he assured his interviewers he would never join the Taliban, he told them that he could sell his rifle to the extremist group for about $2,000—a pretty penny for Zhargi and his family.

Zhargi was far from the first member of Afghanistan’s security forces to consider offering up his equipment to the Taliban in exchange for cash. As the Afghanistan Papers published by the Washington Post in 2019 made clear, it was rather common for U.S. military equipment to go missing, and for U.S. operators to later discover it had been sold or turned over to the Taliban to be used against the U.S. and Afghan Security Forces in combat.

The double-dealing within the Afghan Security Forces that the American foreign policy establishment tried to paper over was on full display once the United States finally withdrew from Afghanistan. The Taliban brokered deals with members of the Afghan Security Forces to surrender and turn over the equipment given to them by the U.S. military even before the U.S. withdrawal was complete.

When the Afghan Security Forces crumbled, effectively paving the way for the Taliban to retake Kabul and become the de facto government of Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of people who worked under the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan were left without jobs and in fear of retaliation from the Taliban forces they helped the United States and its allies fight. Nearly three months removed from the fall of Kabul, the Taliban has reemployed a few former Afghan government workers, specifically from the National Directorate of Security. However, those of whom have been reinstated under the Taliban are heavily supervised and have gone without pay for months.

With the Taliban in control of Afghanistan, the same incentives that once drew young men into the Afghan Security Forces are driving them into ISIS-K. ISIS-K has offered relatively large sums of money to their new recruits, and offers strength in numbers that can help protect these former soldiers if the Taliban were to come looking for them.

Another factor pushing some former members of the Afghan Security Forces towards ISIS-K are tribal and ethnic loyalties. The Taliban is mostly comprised of Pashtuns that make up the country’s ethnic majority. However, in eastern Afghanistan, some regions are majority Tajik or other national ethnic minorities.

“The Taliban was not that unified to begin with, but the other ethnic groups of Afghanistan, who made up a lot of the Afghan Army, have no loyalty to Pashtun leadership regardless if it’s our government or the Taliban,” Korzeniewski said. “If you’re a Tajik and are obligated and motivated to fight for your tribe, ISIS-K gives the opportunity to do so. I’m not surprised many are joining ISIS-K, or some Afghan soldiers joined the Taliban.”

“If there were a resistance, they would have joined the resistance,” Nabil told the Wall Street Journal. “For the time being, ISIS is the only other armed group.” Though the foreign policy establishment has done its best to try and ignore it, this is the political reality of Afghanistan and the surrounding region, where the most brutish and shrewd aspects of human nature are regularly on display.

“Ultimately what matters most to a lot of people aren’t values but considerations of power and influence,” Ruger told TAC. “So, individuals are willing to affiliate with groups that are their best path towards securing more pragmatic gains than a set of beliefs.”

This, Ruger added, should directly “impugn the values promotion agenda pursued by the U.S.” that Middle Eastern countries have used to take advantage of the United States, and, in turn, the American people. “The warning for us is to not fall for this ever again.”

Certainly, the American foreign policy establishment would do well to heed Ruger’s warning, but there isn’t much cause for optimism, given the United States’ track record of interventionist actions creating power vacuums ultimately filled by extremist organizations the U.S. inadvertently played a role in creating.

When the United States and its allies invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein, it refused to institute martial law. With no police authority in place, mass looting and destruction overwhelmed Baghdad and other major population centers. At the time, the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) that was tasked with rebuilding Iraq, and CENTCOM had agreed that recalling the Iraqi army would help provide the security personnel to assist with reconstruction, such as sealing the nation’s borders. When Paul Bremer replaced retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner as director of ORHA, however, he pursued a policy of de-Ba’athification, and disbanded the Iraqi army and intelligence services. With a stroke of a pen, Garner kicked more than half a million people out of their jobs, and prevented them from future employment in the new Iraqi government.

“After the original decision to invade Iraq, disbanding the Iraqi army was probably the most disastrous decision made by the Bush administration,” Dan Caldwell, an Iraq War veteran and senior adviser to Concerned Veterans for America, told TAC.

Once cut out of the project to rebuild Iraq, members of Saddam’s Ba’athist party in the military were well-armed and well-trained potential recruits for extremist groups, or created their own groups to mount an insurgency against U.S. forces. Some of these former Ba’athist military officers became instrumental in the rise of the Islamic State.

“The leadership for what eventually became Isis met in an American prison—Camp Bucca,” Caldwell said in an email. “We swept up al-Baghdadi, and put him in a prison where he met more radical Islamic fundamentalists, and more importantly, he met former Iraqi army officers who would later be his military commanders when he took over large parts of Syria and northern Iraq. It is not unfair or inaccurate to say that the core of Isis was formed in an American prison in Iraq,” and when these prisoners were released, they came out “more radical, better trained, and with better connections to other organizations.”

The Ba’athists were not drawn to the Islamic State because of its ideals or vision of a global caliphate. Although some were radicalized by conflict with U.S. forces, or their subsequent imprisonment, like Saddam, most Ba’athists were secularists that promoted Arab nationalism. Rather, Ba’athists were being brought into the Islamic State by the same forces currently driving former members of the Afghan Security Forces into ISIS-K. Ba’athists and the Islamic State were united in their own self preservation, as well as a mutual hatred of Iraq’s Shi’ite-led government. Just as important was that the Islamic State also offered the former Ba’athist officers an income, which was hard to come by for members of Iraq’s former military after it was disbanded.

As members of the Islamic State, the former Ba’athists helped create and expand the Islamic States’ spy network. Their military experience improved the Islamic States’ combat tactics, enabling the caliphate to capture large amounts of territory throughout the region.

And so, the United States fueled ISIS’s rise, then fought and defeated it, only to accidentally provide one of its affiliates with trained fighters. Whether it’s ISIS, or the Mujahideen that splintered into a number of extremist groups, including Al Qaeda, or the Taliban itself, wherever the American military decides to intervene in the Middle East, terrorists who once received U.S. backed training or salaries seem to follow.

theamericanconservative.com

By Antony LOEWENSTEIN, Peter CRONAU

Australia’s independence from Britain has been contested ground since the nation’s birth in 1901 — the first real test being Australia’s decision to send troops to Europe for Britain’s war with Germany in 1914.

Two bitterly fought referenda to allow military conscription were narrowly defeated — Australia’s contribution to the Great War was to remain a voluntary one.

Move forward to 2021 and the relationship is no less controversial. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and U.S. President Joe Biden announced a new Indo-Pacific military alliance with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in September and awkwardly titled it AUKUS (which as one nave noted, sounds better than USUKA).

In announcing AUKUS, the three leaders loftily claimed to be “guided by our enduring ideals and shared commitment to the international rules-based order.”

The U.K. in July signaled its re-emergence as a Pacific Ocean force when it announced the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth would lead a fleet of U.K. navy ships to join with the U.S. Navy in leading a flotilla of warships including Australian and Japanese vessels through the South China Sea.

The Australian Defence Department would neither confirm nor deny the precise nature of the maritime exercise. However, on this occasion the fleet kept a wary distance from Chinese-claimed territory.

The U.S. may brandish the world’s most powerful military but it is turning towards its traditional friends as it readies for confrontation, and perhaps conflict, with the rising economic and military powerhouse of China.

The AUKUS treaty saw Australia spectacularly dump its $90 billion contract with France to build Australia’s new submarine fleet, instead announcing a deal to buy U.S. and U.K. technology and build nuclear-powered submarines in Australia.

Although not nuclear armed (yet), the first of the new nuclear submarines will not be ready until as late as 2040. Other elements of the treaty, however, will come into play much sooner. Australia will spend $30 billion on new weaponry, including a suite of long-range missiles for its navy and air force, as well as land-based precision strike missiles, largely sourced or developed in conjunction with the U.K. and U.S.

Britain’s resurgent interest in the Pacific region as a part of its “increased international activism” was announced in March with Johnson stating the strategy will “tilt to the Indo-Pacific, increasingly the geopolitical centre of the world.”

Together with the U.S. “pivot to Asia” outlined by U.S. President Barack Obama in 2011, Australia is becoming a focus of a rapid military build-up.

Australia is in a precarious position as the “tilt” and “pivot” of these major powers’ international activism plays out on the strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific. Australia is hoping it is more than a mere “suitable piece of real estate” adrift in the South Pacific.

The world may have got some insight into the true closeness of the new AUKUS relationship when in a September press conference Boris Johnson referred to Scott Morrison as “prime minister Morris” and Biden forgot his name entirely, referring to him instead as “uh, that fella down under.”

Joint Work on New Weapons

In the 1950s and 60s Britain convinced Canberra to allow it to test its prototype nuclear bombs in South Australia. With a nuclear ascendant U.S., Britain was racing to keep a seat at the nuclear table. Australia on the other hand was hoping that helping Britain would ensure them a “nuclear guarantee”.

Described as safe, the bombs’ fallout from the Maralinga and Emu Field tests contaminated livestock and humans, and fallout carried by winds was detected as far away as Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide.

British disinterest saw a Royal Commission in 1985 that led to Australia embarrassing the U.K. into helping fund an attempted clean-up of the sites, with works ending in 2000.

As well as nuclear weapons testing, the Australian desert lands of the Anangu indigenous peoples have for 60 years also hosted other weapons development projects, rocket firings and missile tests at the RAAF Woomera Range Complex, near Maralinga.

It was only in 1994 that the Anangu received compensation for injury and damages of the nuclear testing.

Both Britain and the U.S. are now working on new generation nuclear-capable hypersonic missile projects in Australia — Britain’s BAE Systems has Project Javelin and the U.S. is developing SCIFiRE with arms manufacturers Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

The RAAF Woomera Range has been the site of BAE Systems development work on its Taranis supersonic stealth bomber drone, though the project has stalled, and on the Mantis, a long-endurance drone.

Airbus is also using Australia in developing the Zephyr solar-powered high-altitude long-endurance pseudo-satellite surveillance drone, designed to supply live vision of combat for up to 40 hours from 20 kms high.

It’s been undergoing test flights in the calm air above Wyndham in Western Australia but has suffered several crashes. The U.K. Ministry of Defence is one of the main customers, if not the only customer, for the Zephyr.

While Australia awaits its own fleet of 12 armed Reaper drones, Britain has been making use of RAAF drone pilots embedded with the RAF conducting missions over Iraq and Syria, piloted from the RAF base at Waddington in Lincolnshire.

Australian pilots began training on Reaper drones in 2015 in the U.S. and flew operational missions for the USAF in its war over Iraq and Syria.

Pine Gap

However, it is the top secret Pine Gap satellite surveillance base — officially titled “Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap” (JDFPG, but known generally to the 800 staff as “the base”) – that is Australia’s greatest contribution to the Five Eyes alliance that also includes Canada and New Zealand.

Located near Alice Springs, it’s a base for the C.I.A., National Security Agency and National Reconnaissance Office and collects signals and other data from an array of satellites snooping on military, commercial and private communication systems.

Mirrored with the N.S.A.’s base at  RAF Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, it forms a global surveillance net.

Battlefield intelligence used by the U.S. in its “war on terror” has been gathered and analyzed at Pine Gap for use by the U.S. military including in potentially illegal drone strikes in the Middle East that have killed thousands of civilians.

Gough Whitlam giving a speech during the 1972 election campaign. (National Archives of Australia, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Last year, research by professor Jenny Hocking revealed confidential documents from the Australian National Archive that showed the advance notice that Queen Elizabeth had of the plotting by the governor general. The documents also showed a level of encouragement from senior staff of the Palace in the dismissal of the democratically elected prime minister.Pine Gap first attracted public disquiet in 1975 when the then Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam threatened to reveal the names of C.I.A. agents involved. He was controversially dismissed by the Queen’s representative in Australia, Governor General John Kerr, on November 11, 1975.

At the time of the public and political controversy over Pine Gap, the site hosted just eight satellite dishes. Today, the base is quietly undergoing a new expansion with six new dishes being constructed, bringing the total now to 39.

The new dishes, most likely aimed at detecting missile launches, will boost the U.S.’s planning to fight a nuclear war with China.

Australia is tumbling headlong in accepting the rotational basing of U.S. Marines in Darwin — presently 2,500, soon expected to be 5,000 personnel. South of Darwin, near Katherine, the Tindal RAAF base is undergoing a major upgrade of refueling capability and armaments storage, to allow it to host an expanded range of allied military aircraft, including the U.S.’s long-range B-52 bombers.

Nuclear Proliferation

Australia prides itself on being a member of the “rules-based international order,” however it is cooperating with two nuclear weapons states that are breaching the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Britain has announced it is to increase the number of nuclear warheads it has for its Trident submarines, and together with the U.S. is developing new generation hypersonic missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads anywhere on the globe.

Along with the U.K. and U.S., Australia is a holdout from signing or ratifying the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear War. This treaty would prohibit Australia from “provision of assistance to any State” conducting activities ranging from producing, possessing and stockpiling of nuclear weapons, through to possessing the threat to use nuclear weapons.

The Treaty requirements “to prevent and suppress” prohibited activity “on territory under its jurisdiction or control” would see a range of necessary limitations placed on Australia — including, most importantly, a review of the nuclear war-supporting functions of the Pine Gap satellite surveillance base.

War Crimes in Afghanistan

Australian soldiers on foot patrol in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, Aug. 16, 2008. (ISAF, John Collins, U.S. Navy)

The U.K. and Australia have played a key partnership role since the 9/11 attacks but have dealt with the fallout slightly differently. When the Brereton Report, an Australian-government led investigation into alleged war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan, released its findings in November 2020 the results were devastating.

A four-year inquiry found that 39 Afghan civilians were murdered by Australian forces in 23 incidents in 2009, 2012 and 2013. The Kabul-based Australian photojournalist Andrew Quilty uncovered countless more killings by Australian soldiers that went unmentioned in the Brereton Report.

According to the Australian government, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan may potentially hinder ongoing investigations into war crimes though the country is at its most relatively peaceful for decades. It’s hard not to conclude that Australian officials view the Taliban government as a convenient impediment to progressing with any prosecutions.

Nonetheless, the Brereton Report is one of the more comprehensive examinations of any Western army that occupied Afghanistan after October 2001. None of this is to defend the Australian government’s response to the report, which is filled with obfuscation, denial and willful blindness, but it’s still superior to many other comparable nations.

This is despite both Canada and New Zealand having uncovered hard evidence of their own forces committing abuses in Afghanistan and the U.S. escaping scrutiny after pressuring the International Criminal Court for years to only investigate the Taliban and ISIS.

U.S. President Donald Trump granted clemency to U.S. military personnel who killed Afghans. Fox News had encouraged Trump to pardon these men accused of war crimes.

The seriousness of the Brereton Report was reflected in comments by the Afghan-based Independent Human Rights Commission. Its chairperson, Shaharzad Akbar, said that the Australian investigation should push the U.K., U.S. and other occupation forces to examine their role in the death of civilians since 2001.

She particularly stressed that the U.K. “open an independent inquiry to review and investigate the allegation of unlawful killings by U.K. special forces.”

Instead, the British Ministry of Defence said that its “armed forces are held to the highest standards, and the Service Police have carried out extensive and independent investigations into alleged misconduct of U.K. forces in Afghanistan. As of today, none of the historical allegations under Operation Northmoor have led to prosecutions.”

Despite claiming that it was investigating serious allegations of war crimes in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Britain failed to find anyone senior worth prosecuting despite mountains of evidence. One soldier was jailed for stabbing a 10-year-old Afghan boy.

Nonetheless, cover-ups and lies were central to Whitehall’s response.

The murder of Afghan civilians was not deemed important enough nor the dogged pursuit by Saiffulah Yar who accused U.K. forces of killing four members of his family in Helmand Province in 2011.

There was important reporting by BBC Panorama and BBC Newsnight though overall the Western media has not covered itself in glory reporting the Afghan war, usually preferring government and military sources to Afghans.

Despite the Chilcot inquiry, with its damning assessment of how former Prime Minister Tony Blair pushed his country into war with Iraq, nobody has been seriously held to account for Britain’s failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The fear remains that Australia, despite the Office of the Special Investigator still investigating human rights breaches in Afghanistan, will follow London’s lead and bury or indefinitely delay any potential war crimes trials.

Elite soldier Ben Roberts-Smith is accused of killing Afghan civilians and is currently suing major Australian media reports for daring to report it. The trial has become a proxy war crimes trial while masquerading as a defamation case. It may be the only such trial in the foreseeable future.

Militarized Immigration Policy

Australia’s Manus Island regional immigration processing facility, 2012. (Flickr, DIAC, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

It’s the militarized immigration policy where Canberra arguably inspires London the most. Australia’s immigration policy is known for its brutal disregard for human rights and sending refugees to remote Pacific Islands for processing. The policy has deep roots in Australia’s settler colonial history.

The so-called Pacific Solution began in 2001 and quickly received bi-partisan support in the Federal Parliament. Forcibly placing vulnerable refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Myanmar, Sri Lanka or elsewhere in overcrowded, hot and dangerous locations was a cruelly effective method of dehumanizing and silencing people, many of whom were escaping wars in countries that Australia was supposedly trying to liberate through occupation.

Despite protests from the European Union and many other liberals around the world, Australia’s refugee policy has become a model for the EU and Britain under the Conservative government.

Christmas Island Immigration Detention Centre, Dec. 7, 2008. (Flickr, DIAC, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a right-wing climate denier, set the tone in a 2015 speech when delivering the Margaret Thatcher lecture in London by arguing that Europe should shut its borders completely. “The Australian experience proves that the only way to dissuade people seeking to come from afar is not to let them in,” he said.

The U.K. Conservatives listened and agreed. In 2020, U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel reportedly examined the viability of constructing an asylum seeker detention facility 6,000 kilometers away from Britain, in Ascension Island or St. Helena in the South Atlantic, but eventually decided it was logistically too challenging.

Instead, in 2021 Patel announced that Britain would forcibly push back refugee boats crossing the English Channel, a carbon copy of Australia’s boat turn-back policy which the U.N. estimated in July had resulted in 800 people on 31 boats since 2013 being towed back to potential danger, sinking or death.

In some cases, Australia is credibly accused of covering up actions that led to hundreds of deaths at sea. Australia also stands accused of paying Indonesian people smugglers to keep boats out of Australian waters.

Australia and Britain share a political, ideological and military partnership that transcends partisan bickering. As journalists who have investigated this relationship for years, it’s revealing how little scrutiny is given to it by the establishment media and political elites.

declassifieduk.org

By Scott RITTER

On Aug. 29, the United States murdered ten Afghan civilians in a drone strike. The U.S. Air Force Inspector Gen., Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said, was appointed on Sept. 21, to lead an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the attack. On Nov. 3, Gen. Said released the unclassified findings of his investigation, declaring that while the incident was “regrettable,” no crimes were committed by the U.S. forces involved.

The reality, however, is that the U.S. military engaged in an act of premeditated murder violative of U.S. laws and policies, as well as international law. Everyone involved, from the president on down committed a war crime.

Their indictment is spelled out in the details of what occurred before and during the approximately eight hours a U.S. MQ-9 “Reaper” drone tracked Zemari Ahmadi, an employee of Nutrition and Education International, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that has been operating in Afghanistan since 2003, working to fight malnutrition among women and children who live in high-mortality areas in Afghanistan.

During those eight hours, the U.S. watched Ahmadi carry out mundane tasks associated with life in war-torn Kabul circa Aug. 2021. The U.S. watched until the final minutes leading up to the decision to fire the hellfire missile that would take Ahmadi’s life, and that of nine of his relatives, including seven children.

“The investigation,” Gen. Said concluded in his report, “found no violation of law, including the Law of War.” One of the unanswered questions relating to this conclusion was the precise nature of the framework of legal authorities at play at the time of the drone strike, in particular the rules and regulations being followed by the U.S. military regarding drone strikes, and issues pertaining to Afghan sovereignty when it came to the use of deadly force by the U.S. military on Afghan soil

Policies in Flux

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis speaks to President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence July 20, 2017, at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., following a meeting of the National Security Council. (DOD photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Dominique A. Pineiro)

At the time of the drone strike that murdered Zemari Ahmadi and his family, the policies governing the use of armed drones was in a state of extreme flux. In an effort to gain control over a program which, by any account, had gotten out of control in terms of killing innocent civilians, then-President Barack Obama, in May 2013, promulgated a classified Presidential Policy Guidance (P.P.G.) document entitled “Procedures for Approving Direct Action Against Terrorist Targets Located Outside the United States and Areas of Active Hostilities.”

The 2013 P.P.G. directed that, when it came to the use of lethal action (a term which incorporated direct action missions by U.S. Special Operation forces as well as drone strikes), U.S. government departments and agencies “must employ all reasonably available resources to ascertain the identity of the target so that the action can be taken.” The document also made clear that “international legal principles, including respect for sovereignty and the law of armed conflict, impose important constraints on the ability of the United States to act unilaterally—and the way in which the United States can use force.”

The standards for the use of lethal force set forth in the 2013 P.P.G. contain two important preconditions. First, “there must be a legal basis for using lethal force.” A key aspect of this legal basis is a requirement that the U.S. have the support of a host government prior to the initiation of any lethal force on the territory of that nation. This support is essential, as it directly relates to the issue of sovereignty commitments under the U.N. Charter.

When the 2013 P.P.G. was published, the U.S. had the express permission of the Afghan government to carry out lethal drone strikes on its territory for the purposes of targeting both the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Later, this authorization would extend to encompass the Islamic State-Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K.

In 2017, then-President Donald Trump issued new guidance which loosened the conditions under which lethal force could be used in Afghanistan, including the use of armed drones. The Afghan government continued to provide host nation authorization for these strikes. When President Biden assumed office, in January, he immediately directed his National Security Council to begin a review of the policies and procedures surrounding the use of armed drones in Afghanistan.

One of the issues addressed in this review was whether the Biden administration would return to the Obama-era rules requiring “near certainty” that no women or children are present in an area targeted for drone attack or retain the Trump-era standard of only ascertaining to a “reasonable certainty” that no civilian adult men were likely to be killed.

Complicating matters was the fact that the Biden administration was preparing for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, which required that the rules and procedures for use of armed drones in Afghanistan be altered to reflect a new reality where U.S. forces were no longer being directly supported, and that the armed drone program would be conducted in an environment where the Afghan government was the exclusive recipient of armed drone support. These new rules and procedures were part of what the Biden administration called its “over the horizon” (OTH) counterterrorism strategy.

Before the new OTH policies and procedures directive could be issued, however, the reality on the ground in Afghanistan changed completely, making the policy document obsolete before it was even issued. The rapid advance of the Taliban, coupled with the complete collapse of the Afghan government, threw into question the legal underpinnings regarding the authority of the U.S. government to conduct armed drone operations in Afghanistan.

Taliban fighters in Kabul, Aug. 17, 2021. (VOA, Wikimedia Commons)

The new rulers of Afghanistan, the Taliban, did not approve of U.S. armed drone operations. Instead, the Taliban had executed a secret annex to the February 2020 peace agreement reached with the Trump administration regarding its commitment to dealing with counterterrorism issues in Afghanistan once the U.S. withdrew. President Biden determined that his administration would be bound by the terms of that agreement.

Two points emerge from this new environment—first, from a legal standpoint, the U.S. military remained bound by the “reasonable certainty” of the Trump-era policies regarding the use of armed drones, and second, from the standpoint of international law as it relates to sovereignty commitments, the U.S. had no legal authority to conduct armed drone operations over Afghanistan.

While the U.S. had not formally recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, President Biden’s commitment to adhere to commitments made under the terms of the February 2020 peace agreement, coupled with the fact that the U.S. was engaged in active negotiations with the Taliban in Doha and in Kabul regarding issues pertaining to security of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan and Kabul, make clear that for all sense and purpose, the U.S. treated the Taliban as if they were the sovereign authority in Afghanistan.

In Order to Be Legal

For U.S. drone operations on Aug. 29, to be legal in Afghanistan, the U.S. government had to either gain public approval for these operations from a sovereign authority, gain private approval from a sovereign authority, or else demonstrate that a sovereign authority was unable or unwilling to act, in which case the U.S. could, under certain conditions, consider unilateral action.

Gen. Said does not provide any information as to how he ascertained U.S. compliance under international law. Public statements by the Taliban appear to show that they did not approve of U.S. drone strikes on the territory of Afghanistan. Indeed, when the U.S. carried out a similar drone attack, on Aug. 27, targeting what it claimed were ISIS-K terrorists, the Taliban condemned the strike as a “clear attack on Afghan territory.”

The second precondition set forth in the 2013 P.P.G. authorizing the use of lethal action was that the target must pose “a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.” In his presentation on the Aug. 29, drone strike, Gen. Said stated that “[i]ndividuals directly involved in the strike…believed at the time that they were targeting an imminent threat. The intended target of the strike, the vehicle, its contents and occupant, were genuinely assessed at the time as an imminent threat to U.S. forces.”

When promulgating its 2013 P.P.G. on drone strikes, the Obama administration adopted an expanded definition of what constituted an “imminent threat” published by the Department of Justice in 2011, which eschewed the notion that in order to be considered “imminent”, a threat had to be a specific, concrete threat whose existence must first be corroborated with clear evidence.

Instead, the Obama administration adopted a new definition that held that an imminent threat was inherently continuous because terrorists are assumed to be continuously planning attacks against the U.S.; all terrorist threats are considered both “imminent” and “continuing” by their very nature, removing the need for the military to gather information showing precisely when and where a terrorist threat was going to emerge.

To make the case of an “imminent” (and, by definition, “continuing”) threat, all the U.S. needed to do in the case of Zemari Ahmadi was create a plausible link between him and potential terrorist activity. According to Gen. Said, “highly classified” (i.e., Top Secret) intelligence was interpreted by U.S. personnel to ascertain the existence of a terrorist threat.

This assessment was used to create a linkage with Ahmadi, and the subsequent “observed movement of the vehicle and occupants over an 8-hour period” resulted in confirmation bias linking Ahmadi to the assessed terrorist threat.

Who Was in Command?

Part of Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar. (U.S. National Archives)

Zemari Ahmadi’s actions on Aug. 29, did not trigger the drone attack. Instead, the U.S. appeared to be surveilling a specific location in Kabul, looking for a White Toyota Corolla (ironically, the most prevalent model and color of automobile operating in Kabul) that was being converted by ISIS-K terrorists into a weapon to be used against U.S. forces deployed in the vicinity of Kabul International Airport.

This safe house was located about five kilometers west of Kabul International Airport, in one of Kabul’s dense residential neighborhoods. The specific source of this information is not known but given Gen. Said’s description of it as “highly classified”, it can be assumed that this information involved the interception of specific communications on the part of persons assessed as being affiliated with ISIS-K, and that these communications had been geolocated to a specific area inside Kabul.

One of the issues confronting the U.S. during this time was the absolute chaotic nature of the command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) infrastructure that would normally be in place when carrying out any military operations overseas, including something as politically sensitive as a lethal drone strike. It wasn’t just the policy guidelines for the use of lethal drone strikes that were in limbo on Aug. 29, 2021, but also who, precisely, oversaw what was going on regarding the employment of drones in Afghanistan.

The U.S. military and C.I.A. had completely withdrawn from Afghanistan when the decision was made to begin noncombatant evacuation operations (N.E.O.) operating from Kabul International Airport. The deployment of some 6,000 U.S. military personnel was accompanied by an undisclosed number of C.I.A. and Special Operations forces who were tasked with sensitive human and technical intelligence collection, including intelligence sharing and coordination with the Taliban.

To support this activity, an expeditionary joint operations center (JOC) was established by U.S. forces, led by Rear Admiral Peter Vasely, a Navy SEAL originally dispatched to Afghanistan to lead Special Operations, but who took over command of all forces when the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Scott Miller, left in July 2021.

Admiral Vasely was assisted by Major Gen. Chris Donahue, a former Delta Force officer who commanded the 82^nd Airborne Division. While both Vasey and Donahue were experienced combat commanders, they were singularly focused on the issue of securing the airport and evacuating personnel under a very constrained timeline. Managing drone operations would be handled elsewhere.

As part of President Biden’s vision for Afghanistan post-U.S. evacuation (and pre-Afghan government collapse), the Department of Defense had established what was known as the Over the Horizon Counter-Terrorism Headquarters at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar. Commanded by Brigadier Gen. Julian C. Cheater, Over the Horizon Counter-Terrorism, comprised of 544 personnel, was tasked with planning and executing missions in support of Special Operations Command-Central across four geographically-separated locations in the United States Central Command area of responsibility, including Afghanistan.

But Gen. Cheater had only assumed command in July, and his organization was still getting settled into its new quarters (Brigadier Gen. Constantin E. Nicolet, the deputy commanding general for intelligence for the Over the Horizon Counter-Terrorism headquarters, did not arrive until Aug. 11.) As such, much of the responsibility for coordinating drone operations into the overall air campaign operating in support of the Kabul N.E.O. (which, in addition to multiple C-17 and C-130 airlift missions per day, included AC-130 gunships, B-52 bombers, F-15 fighters, and multiple MQ-9 Reaper drones) was handled by Central Command’s Combined Air Operations Center (C.A.O.C.), located at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar.

The Video Source

Capt. Richard Koll, left, and Airman 1st Class Mike Eulo perform function checks after launching MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle Aug. 7 at Balad Air Base, Iraq. (U.S. Air Force/Master Sgt. Steve Horton)

Gen. Said, in his presentation, made mention of “multiple video feeds” when speaking of the information being evaluated by U.S. military personnel regarding the strike that killed Ahmadi and his family. This could imply that more than one MQ-9 drone was operating over Kabul that day, or that video feeds from other unspecified sources were also being viewed.

It also could be that the MQ-9 that fired the Hellfire missile that killed Ahmadi and his nine relatives was flying by itself; the MQ-9 carries the Multi-Spectral Targeting System, which integrates an infrared sensor, color, monochrome daylight TV camera, shortwave infrared camera, the full-motion video from each which can be viewed as separate video streams or fused together. In this way, one drone can provide several distinct video “feeds”, each of which can be separately assessed for specific kinds of information.

The MQ-9 is also capable of carrying an advanced signals intelligence (SIGINT) pod, producing yet another stream of data that would need to be evaluated. It is not known if this pod was in operation over Kabul on Aug. 29. However, according to The New York Times, U.S. officials claim that that the U.S. intercepted communications between the white corolla and the suspected ISIS-K safehouse (in actuality, the N.I.E. country director’s home/N.I.E. headquarters) instructing the driver (Ahmadi) to make several stops.

Logic dictates that the U.S. military kept at least one, and possible more, MQ-9’s over Kabul at all times, providing continuous intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance overwatch during the conduct of the evacuation operation. The primary MQ-9 unit operating in the Persian Gulf region at the time was the 46^th Expeditionary Attack Squadron, which operated out of Ali Al Salem Air Base, in Kuwait.

Given the logistical realities associated with drone operations over Afghanistan, which required a lengthy flight down the Persian Gulf, skirting Iran, and then over Pakistan, before reaching the central Afghanistan region, the 46^th Expeditionary Attack Squadron more than likely forward deployed a ground control station used to take off and recover the MQ-9 drones, along with an undisclosed number of drone aircraft, to Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar.

The time of flight from Al Udeid to Kabul for an MQ-9 drone is between 5 and 6 hours; a block 5 version of the MQ-9, such as those operated by the 46^th Expeditionary Attack Squadron, can operate for up to 27 hours. It is possible that a single MQ-9 drone was on station for the entire period between when Ahmadi was first taken under surveillance until the decision to launch the Hellfire missile that killed him was made; it is also very possible that there was a turnover between one MQ-9 and another at some point during the mission. In either instance, a long-duration mission such as that being conducted on Aug. 29, would have been logistically and operationally challenging.

The crew from the 46^th Expeditionary Attack Squadron was responsible for launching and recovering the MQ-9 drone from its operating base; once in the air, control of the drone was turned over to drone crews assigned to the 432^nd Expeditionary Air Wing, based out of Creech Air Base, in Nevada. These crews work with the Persistent Attack and Reconnaissance Operations Center, or PAROC, also located at Creech Air Base.

The PAROC coordinates between the 432nd Wing Operations Center, which serves as the focal point for combat operations, and the Over the Horizon Counter-Terrorism Headquarters and Central Command Combined Air Operations Center, both out of Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. The PAROC serves as a singular focal point for mission directors, weather analysis, intelligence analysis and communications for drone operations over Afghanistan.

At each node in this complex command and control system, the video feeds from the drone(s) involved can be monitored and assessed by personnel. Such an overlapping network of agencies was implied by Gen. Said in his presentation, when he spoke of interviewing “29 individuals, including 22 directly involved in the strike” for his report.

Given that Gen. Said’s remit is limited to the military forces involved, it is not known if he interviewed another party reportedly involved in the drone strike—the C.I.A. Multiple sources have indicated that C.I.A. analysts were involved in evaluating the video feeds associated with the drone strike of Aug. 29, and that they provided input regarding the nature of the target.

C.I.A. Involvement

Aerial view of C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia. (Carol M. Highsmith, Wikimedia Commons)

The C.I.A. operates what is known as the Counterterrorism Airborne Analysis Center out of its Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. There, a fusion cell of intelligence analysts drawn from across the U.S. intelligence community monitor a wall of flat screen monitors that beamed live, classified video feeds from drones operating from around the world, including Afghanistan.

The C.I.A.’s involvement suggests that because of the confusion surrounding the legality of drone operations in Afghanistan following the collapse of the Afghan government, the Biden administration opted to conduct drone operations under Title 50, covering covert C.I.A. activities, as opposed to Title 10, which cover operations conducted under traditional military chain of command.

In any event, what is known is that an MQ-9 drone, flown by pilots from the 432^nd Expeditionary Wing operating out of Creech Air Base, in Nevada, was surveilling a specific neighborhood in Kabul on the morning of Aug. 29, where intelligence sources indicated an ISIS-K terrorist cell was in the process of converting a white Toyota Corolla into a weapon—perhaps a car bomb—that was to be used against U.S. forces operating at Kabul International Airport.

The U.S. forces operating in Afghanistan were on high alert—on Aug. 26, ISIS-K fighters had launched a coordinated attack using suicide bombers and gunmen on a U.S. checkpoint at the airport, killing 13 U.S. service members and some 170 Afghans, including nearly 30 Taliban fighters.

According to a timeline put together by The New York Times, Zemari Ahmadi left his home, located in a neighborhood about two kilometers west of the airport, in a white Toyota Corolla owned by his employer, Nutrition and Education International (N.E.I.). Ahmadi had worked with N.E.I. since 2006 as an electrical engineer and volunteer, helping distribute food to Afghans in need.

The country director for N.E.I. had called Ahmadi at around 8:45 am, asking him if he could stop by the country director’s home and pick up a laptop computer. Ahmadi left his home at around 9 am, and drove to the country director’s home, located about five kilometers northwest of the airport. The drone operators were surveilling the compound where the country director lived, having assessed that it was an ISIS-K safe house.

It is at this point the intelligence failures that led to the murder of Ahmadi and his family began. The country director, whose name has been omitted for security reasons, is a well-known individual whose biometric information, including place of work and residence, has been captured by a highly classified Department of Defense biometric system called the Automatic Biometric Identification System, or ABIS. ABIS, part of what the U.S. calls its strategy of “Identity Dominance”, was specifically set up to help identify targets for drone strikes and was said to contain more than 8.1 million records.

The ABIS, when integrated with other data bases such as the Afghanistan Financial Management Information System, which held extensive details on foreign contractors, and an Economy Ministry database that compiled all international development and aid agencies (such as N.E.I.) into a singular searchable Geographic Information System, or G.I.S., gives an analyst the ability to scroll a cursor over a map of Kabul, coming to rest over a given building, and immediately accessing information about who resides there.

Both the country director and Ahmadi, as Afghans affiliated with western aid organizations who moved with relative freedom around Kabul, were included in these data bases.

Massive Intelligence Failure

The MQ-1 Predator unmanned aircraft. (U.S. Air Force, Leslie Pratt)

The fact that a U.S. intelligence analyst could confuse the known residence/headquarters of a U.S.-funded aid organization with an ISIS-K safe house is inexcusable, if indeed these data bases were available for query.

It is possible that (because of the transitional environment) the events of Aug. 29 transpired with no definitive rules of engagement in place, and that the command and control structure was in a high state of flux, so that the data base was either shut down or otherwise inaccessible. In any case, the inability to access data that had been collected over the course of many years by the United States for the express purpose of helping facilitate the counterterrorism-associated targeting of armed drones represents an intelligence failure of the highest order.

The community of analysts, spread across several time zones and distinct geographical regions, representing agencies with differing legal and operational frameworks, began monitoring the movement and activities of Ahmadi. He picked up a laptop computer from the country director, which was stored in a black carrying case of the kind typically used to carry laptop computers. Unfortunately for Ahmadi, the ISIS-K suicide bombers who attacked the U.S. position at Kabul International Airport on Aug. 26 carried bombs that had been placed in similar black carrying cases, reinforcing what Gen. Said called a chain of “confirmation bias.”

Ahmadi then went on a series of excursions, picking up coworkers at their homes, dropping them off at various locations, stopping for lunch, and distributing food. Near the end of the day, Ahmadi returned to the N.E.I. headquarters where he used a hose to fill up plastic containers with water to bring home (there was a water shortage throughout Kabul, and Ahmadi’s home had no running water.)

Zemari Ahmadi. (Ptipti/Wikimedia Commons)

Analysts watching Ahmadi’s actions somehow mistook the act of using a garden hose to fill plastic jugs with water as him picking up plastic containers containing high explosives that could be used in a car bomb—another case of “confirmation bias.”

At least 22 sets of eyes were watching this, using multi-spectral cameras capable of ascertaining movement of water, temperature variations, all in high-resolution video feeds. How not a single pair of eyes picked up on what was really happening is, yet again, a huge failure of intelligence, either in terms of training as an imagery analyst, poor analytical skills, or both.

But even with all of this “confirmation bias” weighing in favor of classifying Ahmadi as an “imminent threat”, neither he nor his family were condemned to die. Under International Human Rights Law, lethal force is legal only if it is required to protect life (making lethal force proportionate) and there is no other means, such as capture, of preventing that threat to life (making lethal force necessary).

If Ahmadi’s car, upon leaving the country director’s home, had headed toward a U.S.-controlled checkpoint around Kabul International Airport, then U.S. personnel monitoring the drone feed would have had every right, under the procedures then in place, to consider Ahmadi a “continuing imminent threat” to American life, thereby freeing the drone crew to fire a Hellfire missile at the vehicle to destroy it.

Instead, he drove home, pulling into the interior courtyard of his building complex. At this juncture, Ahmadi and his vehicle could not, under any circumstance, be considered an active threat to American life. Moreover, with the vehicle immobile and still under observation, options could now be considered for “other means”, such as capture, to remove the vehicle and Ahmadi as a potential future threat.

While the U.S. and the Taliban had an implicit agreement that U.S. forces would not operate outside the security perimeter of Kabul International Airport, the Taliban were fully capable of sending a force to investigate and, if necessary, detain Ahmadi and his vehicle. The U.S. admits to actively sharing intelligence with the Taliban and acknowledge that the Taliban had proven itself capable of acting decisively to neutralize threats based upon the information provided by the U.S.

The Taiban interest in stopping a suicide bomber was manifest—they had suffered twice as many killed than the U.S. in the Aug. 26 attack on the Airport, and were sworn enemies of ISIS-K. All the U.S. had to do was pass the coordinates of Ahmadi’s home to the Taliban, and then sit back and watch as the Taliban responded. If the Taliban failed to act, or Ahmadi attempted to drive away from his home in the white corolla, then the U.S. would be within its rights under international law to attack the car using lethal force.

However, to get there the U.S. first needed to cross the legal hurdle of exhausting “other means” of neutralizing the potential threat posed by Ahmadi’s car. They did not, and in failing to do so, were in violation of international law when, instead, they opted to launch a Hellfire missile.

Ignoring the Children

The decision to fire the Hellfire missile was made within two minutes of Ahmadi arriving at his home. According to The New York Times, when he arrived, his car was swarmed by children—his, and those of his brother, who lived with him. For some reason, the presence of children was not picked up by any of the U.S. military personnel monitoring the various video feeds tracking Ahmadi.

The drone crew determined that there was a “reasonable certainty”—the Trump-era standard, not the “near certain” standard that would have been in place had the Biden administration published its completed policy guidance document regarding drone strikes—that there were no civilians present. How such a conclusion can be reached when, on review, the video clearly showed the presence of children two minutes before the Hellfire missile was launched—has not been explained.

But Gen. Said wasn’t the only one who saw children on the video feed. At the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Airborne Analysis Center in Langley, at least one analyst working in the fusion cell there saw the children as well. According to media reports, the C.I.A. was only able to communicate this information to the drone operators who fired the Hellfire after the missile had been launched, part of the breakdown in communications that Gen. Said attributed to the chain of mistakes that led to the deaths of Ahmadi and his family.

Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said. (U.S. Air Force)

What Gen. Said failed to discuss was the communications channels that the C.I.A. information had to travel to get to the drone operators. Did the C.I.A. have a direct line to the pilots of the 432^nd Expeditionary Wing? Or did the C.I.A. need to go through the Over the Horizon Counter-Terrorism headquarters, the Central Command’s Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC), the Persistent Attack and Reconnaissance Operations Center, or PAROC, or the 432nd Wing Operations Center, which communicated directly with the drone crew?

According to The New York Times, the tactical commander made the decision to launch the Hellfire missile, another procedural holdover from the Trump-era, which did away with the need for high-level approval of the target before lethal force could be applied.

The professionalism of those involved in reviewing the drone feed was further called into question when the analysts, observing a post-strike explosion of a propane tank in the courtyard of Ahmadi’s apartment complex, mistook the visual signature produced as being that of a car bomb containing significant quantities of high explosive.

Gen. Said’s report covers up a multitude of mistakes under the guise of “confirmation bias.” In his report he notes that “[t]he overall threat to U.S. forces at [Kabul International Airport] at the time was very high,” with intelligence indicating that follow-on attacks were “imminent.” Perhaps most importantly, Gen. Said writes that “[t]hree days prior, such an attack resulted in the death of 13 service members and at least 170 Afghan civilians. The events that led to the strike and the assessments of this investigation should be considered with this context in mind.”

If that is indeed the standard, then Gen. Said must consider the words of President Biden at a press conference held on Aug. 26, after the ISIS-K attack on Kabul International Airport. “We will hunt you down and make you pay,” Biden said. “We will not forgive, we will not forget.”

Revenge was clearly a motive, with the drone operators leaning forward to put into action the President’s directive to hunt the enemy down and make them pay. Did the drone operators see children in the video feed? They say no, even though the C.I.A. analysts saw them prior to the launching of the Hellfire missile, and Gen. Said saw them after the fact.

These same drone operators were riding high on four years of “hands off” operations, where they were free to launch drone strikes under a “reasonable certainty” standard which was put in place knowing that the result would be more innocent civilians killed.

“Some of the Obama administration rules were getting in the way of good strikes,” one U.S. official is quoted saying about the need for looser restrictions. Gen. Said makes no reference to the impact the Trump-era policy had on conditioning drone operators to be more tolerant of civilian casualties, even to the extent that they looked the other way if acknowledgement of their presence could prevent a “good strike.”

What’s Wrong With the Program

A BQM-74E drone launches from the flight deck of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen (U.S. Navy photo by Cryptologic Technician 1st Class Carl T. Jacobson/Released)

The drone strike that killed Ahmadi and his family in many ways embodies all that was wrong with the U.S. lethal drone program as it was implemented in Afghanistan and elsewhere, failing to further legitimate U.S. national security objectives while harming U.S. credibility by wantonly killing innocent civilians.

A case can be made for criminal negligence on the part of all parties involved in the murder of Ahmadi and his family. But it is unlikely that any such charges will ever be put forward. The attack clearly violates international law, although the Biden administration will claim otherwise.

Gen. Said acknowledges so-called “confirmation bias” without getting to the bottom of what caused those involved in the drone strike to get it so wrong. Gen. Said alludes to systemic problems, such as the need to “enhance sharing of overall mission situational awareness during execution” and review “pre-strike procedures used to assess presence of civilians.”

But systemic (i.e., procedural) errors can only explain away so much. At some point the professionalism of the individuals involved must come under scrutiny, both in terms of their technical qualifications to carry out their respective assigned missions, as well as their moral character in willingly tolerating the deaths of innocent civilians in the name of mission accomplishment. Gen. Said leaves open the possibility that someone, somewhere, in the chain of command of these individuals can decide that the events of that day was a byproduct of “subpar performance” resulting in some form of “adverse action.”

That, however, is just another way of excusing murder, of tolerating a war crime committed in the name of the United States.

The day after Ahmadi and his family were murdered by U.S. forces, ISIS-K, operating from a safe house near to where the N.E.I. country director lived, used a modified white Toyota Corolla to launch rockets toward the U.S. positions in and around Kabul International Airport.

Fortunately, there were no causalities. But neither was the ISIS-K attack thwarted by a U.S. drone program that had been tipped off in advance about the nature and location of the attack. The ability to kill innocent civilians while failing to interdict genuine security threats is perhaps the most accurate epitaph one could ascribe to the U.S. lethal drone program in Afghanistan.

consortiumnews.com

The mass media are full of headlines announcing that a “watchdog” has concluded in an “independent” investigation that US military personnel did nothing wrong in an August airstrike in Kabul which killed ten civilians and zero combatants.

“An independent Pentagon review has concluded that the U.S. drone strike that killed innocent Kabul civilians and children in the final days of the Afghanistan war was not caused by misconduct or negligence, and it doesn’t recommend any disciplinary action,” the Associated Press reports in an article titled “Watchdog finds no misconduct in mistaken Afghan airstrike”.

The word “watchdog” appears nowhere else in the article apart from its title, which means it was calculatingly chosen by an AP editor for the public (the vast majority of whom only read headlines) to see. When people hear the word “watchdog” in reference to scrutiny of government institutions they naturally think of the standard usage of that term: parties outside the institution being watched like Amnesty International or the American Civil Liberties Union. They most certainly don’t think of “watchdogs” being the government institutions themselves, as is the case here.

“The review, done by the Air Force Lt. Gen. Sami Said, found there were breakdowns in communication and in the process of identifying and confirming the target of the bombing, according to a senior defense official familiar with the report,” AP informs us.

The US Air Force is of course a branch of the US Department of Defense. So the Pentagon literally did the “we investigated ourselves and cleared ourselves of any wrongdoing” meme, and the mainstream press is passing that off as a real thing in much the same manner as the famous 1997 New York Times headline “C.I.A. Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade”.

The claim that the investigation was “independent” is justified later in the AP report:

“As inspector general of the Air Force, Said had no direct connection to Afghanistan operations and thus was deemed an independent judge of the matter,” the article reads.

So AP was told by their source, a senior defense official, that the report is “independent”, and then they passed that claim on to their readers as though it’s an objective fact when it is in reality an assertion by a US government official. This Pentagon stenography is journalistic malpractice.

AP, along with Reuters and AFP, is one of just three news agencies which write the bulk of international news media reporting in the western world. Corporate media outlets who generally can’t be bothered to do their own original reporting on international affairs often run articles published by those agencies, along with whatever propaganda, spin, and journalistic malpractice they happen to contain. A quick search shows that this AP report has already been picked up and run verbatim by Politico, The Independent, Yahoo News, and many other outlets.

Not only there is there clearly nothing “independent” about government officials investigating their own agencies, but the possibility of any actual independent review of the airstrike has been made impossible, since the Pentagon’s report on the matter has been classified.

“The full report on the strike, which includes several recommendations on how to avoid similar incidents in the future, is classified,” reports Business Insider, who also used the word “watchdog” in its headline.

BREAKING: A Pentagon review concludes that the U.S. drone strike that killed innocent Kabul civilians and children in the final days of the Afghanistan war was not caused by misconduct or negligence, and doesn’t recommend disciplinary action, @AP learns. https://t.co/PQ7HvbhMjg

— The Associated Press (@AP) November 3, 2021

The world is dominated by opaque and unaccountable government agencies who are legitimized and normalized by the mass media. The Pentagon killed ten people, none of whom were combatants and seven of whom were children, lied about it, got exposed, investigated itself and found that those who perpetrated the attack were not even guilty of so much as negligence, then classified the report and called it a day. And then the mass media legitimized this by calling it an “independent” investigation conducted by a “watchdog”.

As we discussed previously, this is just one of thousands of airstrikes the Pentagon has launched since its “war on terror” began, a huge percentage of which have included civilian casualties and virtually none of which have ever been subject to this much critical analysis. The only reason this one is gaining special attention is because of the highly politicized nature of President Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal which the mass media aggressively criticized the entire time. It was only because this dynamic led to a New York Times investigation which showed the alleged “ISIS-K” target the Pentagon claimed it had slain was actually an aid worker named Zemari Ahmadi.

Dr. Steven Kwon, co-founder and president of the Nutrition and Education International where Ahmadi worked, released a statement on the Air Force inspector general’s conclusion:

“This investigation is deeply disappointing and inadequate because we’re left with many of the same questions we started with. I do not understand how the most powerful military in the world could follow Zemari, an aid worker, in a commonly used car for eight hours, and not figure out who he was, and why he was at a U.S. aid organization’s headquarters. According to the Inspector General, there was a mistake but no one acted wrongly, and I’m left wondering, how can that be? Clearly, good military intentions are not enough when the outcome is 10 precious Afghan civilian lives lost and reputations ruined.”

The most powerful military force ever assembled does not care about human beings and is completely unaccountable to the public. That’s why these things happen, and that’s why they will continue to happen until this entire corrupt power structure ceases to be.

caityjohnstone.medium.com